Our children may never know the struggle of trying to cram what you want to say in 140 characters; Twitter has announced that they are extending the character limit to 280 for users worldwide. After a successful test with select users, 280-characters tweets will be available for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. (The company cited the brevity of Asian tweets as the reason for not extending the character limit in those languages, deeming it unnecessary.)

Twitter decided to make the change after seeing that nine percent of tweets hit the 140 character limit. Spokeswoman Aliza Rosen said on Twitter’s blog:

We are making this change after listening and observing a problem our global community was having (it wasn’t easy enough to Tweet!), studying data to understand how we could improve, trying it out, and listening to your feedback. We’ll continue listening and working to make Twitter easier for everyone while making sure we keep what you love.

Many users say that the extended character limit ruins the dynamics of Twitter – like author J.K. Rowling:

Some are even refusing to use more than 140 characters- like celebrity and renowned Twitter queen Chrissy Teigen:

There have also been concerns that the new limit will result in many longer tweets, and, as a result, clogged Twitter feeds. However, Twitter has stated that in their test markets, this was not an issue. Although the novelty of the new character limit resulted in many longer tweets initially, after about a week, tweets returned to more normal lengths. Only one percent of tweets actually reached the 280-character limit, and only five percent exceeded the previous 140-character limit.

Will the extended character limit result in more thoughtful tweets and more civil discourse on Twitter? Doubtful. But the extended character limit does allow for longer – and more – hashtags, and could be helpful to organizations who just need a few extra characters to adequately express their messages. What do you think about the new character limit? Vote in our Twitter poll here.